Early termination fees seem like a fair trade-off for severing a term contract early. That doesn't scream "junk fee" to me as much as hotel resort fees and other BS. If you get a better price for committing to a period of service, how is that in any way predatory or harmful to the consumer? A termination fee is like pro-rating at the non-committed rate.
Keep in mind that these companies fight tooth and nail against public network infrastructure.
Then, they turn around and selectively deploy. Charge and arm and a leg for any deployment that isn't convenient. And, regardless of cost of deployment -- which is negligible for structures with pre-existing infrastructure -- try to lock customers into year or even multi-year commits.
But what about recouping their costs in the face of initial teaser rates for new customers? Well, what about the fact that as an existing customer, I have to fight to avoid being charged > 5x that teaser rate?
This all speaks to oligopoly where not monopoly, and to the extortion of a geographically captured customer base.
I had a two year contract with Comcast. Ended up needing to move a year into it- of course they didn’t offer service where I was moving to. I didn’t even want to do the contact to start with, but the cost to not be in a contact was insane. They are absolutely predatory. It’s been five years, so I could be misremembering, but I don’t think there was a shorter contract period than the two years.
Anyways, after a couple hours on the phone, I was able to get out of paying the early cancellation fee- which was very steep and was based on the amount of money I had ‘saved’ by being in a contract. A few months later I got a bill for it and had to spend another couple hours on the phone convincing them that they had let me out of it. I hope to never live within their service area again.
Some service providers offer no options other than a long contract. HughesNet, for example, has a two year commitment, which doesn't include the equipment that you have to buy or rent.
To play devil's advocate, I can see the fees being justified to recoup setup costs that may be incurred for new service, etc but if there are already broken out costs for installation, equipment, etc it becomes far less defensible.
